Training for public officers involved in urban regeneration

Integrated urban regeneration

Multilevel coordination

FosterREG aims at enhancing public capacity at local, regional and national levels to plan, finance and manage integrated urban regeneration for sustainable energy uptake, through capacity building, promotion and articulation of effective multilevel coordination, and national as well as European network strengthening. These objectives will be achieved through public stakeholders’ engagement in joint analysis and knowledge development activities, as well as creation and dissemination of targeted training materials and activities across Europe.Read more...

Results FosterREG Collaborative Analysis revealed

Earlier this year, in parallel, in FosterREG three national clusters (in Croatia, the Netherlands and Spain), a series of workshops have addressed the barriers to reach the EU objectives on Energy Efficiency in Urban Regeneration. Specifically for this purpose a process map has been developed to guide a collaborative approach (with several stakeholders), first identifying the barriers, generating a long list of solutions and working towards coherent strategies to overcome the identified barriers.

In Spain, five regional sessions were organised to gather the most important issues and barriers that are perceived at the local and regional level. Representatives of regional energy suppliers, urban planners, architects and local authorities have worked together on a list of barriers. The latter two steps took place in a larger set up in Derio (Basque Country) aimed at jointly identifying solutions and developing strategies. Summary of the Spanish workshops is available here.

Croatian Partners on the other hand, organised a large meeting on the regional level, in the city of Osijek, where over 70 representatives of building managers, energy consultants, local authorities, energy companies etc. were invited and participated in the process of identifying existing barriers and generating solutions to minimize them. Final collaboration event was organised in Zagreb, where a large group of stakeholders, including a high share of ministerial representatives were present to discuss the coherent strategies to overcome these barriers, and smartly combine solutions and actions requiring involvement from various stakeholders. Read more about workshops in Croatia here.

The Netherlands organized two medium sized sessions, one for identification of barriers in collaboration with all relevant stakeholders and representatives of national, regional and local authorities. In the closing minutes of this session, participants were asked to identify relevant stakeholders that should be present in the next meeting in order to work on solutions and strategies. One month later, a larger group came to Utrecht, for a full day working session. In the morning, solutions were listed to deal with the barriers in three parallel groups. In the afternoon session, smart intervention led to the selection of the three most relevant topics to build a coherent strategy on. These topics are improving the uptake of energy efficiency measures through innovative energy service company contracts, working more service oriented and developing a district wide coherent approach for the gas infrastructure renewal task. More information on the workshops carried out in the Netherlands is available here.

As the number of barriers, solutions and even strategies identified in each country, is too long to deal with in the length of this article, it is worth expressing the joy all FosterREG partners feel with sharing the experience, results and lessons learned over the three national clusters. Accordingly, we have been able to work on a common ground, and identified four main issues that have been recognised in all country studies. These four aspects, linking the barriers, solutions and strategies of various countries are:

Raising awareness, and capacity building (dealing with the need for proper information)

Finance (resources are needed, programmes designed for fair distribution, rules and structure to ensure pay back, or revolving is possible)

Integration and coordination efforts (focussing on the interdisciplinary working (Urban planning/ Regeneration and Energy for instance), and coordination between the local, regional and national/ EU authorities regarding policies, legislation and finance).

The main objective of the strategies is to continue working on implementation, with the right stakeholders and partners being involved and committed to take appropriate actions. For instance in the Netherlands, one strategy evoked for establishing an ESCO construct for the typical owner occupying housing stock, to make an energy efficient refurbishment possible, by means of a revolving fund programme available. This strategy already led to an actual working group, within a medium sized city in the South, where municipality, province authorities, energy consultants and real estate developers are working on actual implementation of this model into practice.

The results and findings from the implemented workshops have been integrated in national reports: